Kurosawa had had multiple run-ins with Japan’s wartime censors-including the first time he released Sanshiro Sugata in 1943-and it seemed they’d gotten the last laugh with the permanent scarring of his maiden film. (For instance: characters we’ve never seen suddenly pop up in what were meant to be their second scenes, without sufficient material to inform us who they are and what they want-requiring the audience to fill in the blanks based on what they remember from an intertitle from much earlier.) Although the remnants are certainly interesting and demonstrate that Kurosawa’s technical brilliance was on fast track development, this heavily fragmented film is more of a curious specimen, notable for its historical importance as opposed to any greater artistic achievement. Unfortunately, many of the cut scenes were vital in establishing character motive and maintaining the story’s rhythm, and their absence results in awkward narrative skimps and plot threads that don’t feel complete in and of themselves. To compensate for the missing scenes, Toho’s editors spliced in big, wordy intertitles describing their content and it is this shorter version-disclaimer and intertitles intact-which remains most accessible today. As much as we’d like to show the original version, we were not able to locate the cut footage.” Kurosawa’s original ran an hour and thirty-seven minutes in length, but the version that returned to theaters clocked in at only 79. 1,845 feet of footage was cut in 1944, to comply with the government’s wartime entertainment policies. In April 1952, Akira Kurosawa’s directorial debut, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), was re-released to Japanese theaters with a rather heart-wrenching disclaimer: “This film has been modified from its original version without consulting the director or the production staff.
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